The year I graduated from college, several other students and I went to a bar with two of our political theory professors. On each table was a sign that urged patrons not to discuss politics or religion. Teachers and students of politics, we laughed about this. The little sign was, of course, at least slightly facetious. But it betokens a deep-rooted popular antipathy toward politics so succinctly that I still recall it from time to time: when I hear about relatives who ruin a holiday gathering by discussing one or the other of those two taboo subjects, or when a friend told me that, planning her wedding, she had to carefully arrange the tables so the liberal side of the family was at a safe distance from the Trump supporters.
Two implications of this widespread desire to prevent disagreement interest me. The first is that politics and religion are thought to almost necessarily produce conflict when introduced into conversation. That this should be the case for religion is not totally without grounds, especially in the case of clashing monotheisms, each of which tells its adherents to worship one god alone. It is less clear to me that this must always be the case with politics, but here, too, first principles are involved: core beliefs from which all our other opinions and judgments spring. When our first principles are irreconcilable with those of our interlocutors, the thinking goes, hostility will necessarily emerge. In this there lies an epistemological claim that—since humans will always be thrown back on principles that are essentially articles of faith, either because reason cannot get us to the same principles or because too few use reason at all—emotion prevails.
The second implication of the American antipathy toward politics is that, due to this perceived epistemological constraint, some think the best thing to do is to exclude these topics from conversation or, to take it further, to abstain from politics altogether. From the standpoint of political freedom, this might be a damning eventuality: the historical connection between anti-politics and authoritarianism is strong. Thomas Hobbes, in view of the civil unrest that precipitated the English Civil War, famously proposed that due to the ceaseless vacillations and contradictions of human opinion, the only means of guaranteeing civil order was to install an absolute monarch, the Leviathan, as the final judge and executor in conflicts among men. The only means by which the Leviathan could transcend these disputes, and the epistemological morass that lay beneath them, was by standing above the law. There is a long and not always ill-esteemed tradition of political thinkers who posit that in the interest of security and stability, the freedom born by way of law must, at times, be suspended. It is from this state of suspension that Carl Schmitt made his famous formulation of sovereign power in Political Theology: “sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” meaning that the power of political leaders is measured by their ability to suspend the normal legal order in times of crisis. Schmitt used his theory of sovereignty as a legal justification for the Nazi regime, earning him the retrospective title “Crown Jurist of the Third Reich.”
If one accepts the premise that politics and religion create unnecessary conflict, scaling up from an uncomfortable holiday dinner all the way to a civil war, then where else indeed can one turn than authoritarianism (the exclusion of normal people from political life) or anarchy (the elimination of politics and, potentially, of religion, altogether)? An alternative solution comes from Hannah Arendt, who champions political action for those who seek it. In On Revolution, Arendt outlines the manner in which the “revolutionary spirit” of public participation was found and eventually lost in both the French and American revolutions. Arendt concludes by rejecting both models of representative government in favor of the “council system,” discovered spontaneously in different times and places. In the pre-revolutionary United States, such a system was anticipated by close-knit New England townships, where individual citizens took governance into their own hands through extensive public participation. Arendt believes this system was a mode of government that could have reconciled the old political problem of maintaining, on the one hand, political freedom and equality, and, on the other, political authority.
The council system could have struck this balance between freedom and authority, in Arendt’s account, by enabling those who sought political excellence (not social distinction or privilege) to come to the fore of their own accord, rather than being voted in by a politically disaffected mass of people who, isolated from the experience of action in the public sphere, think primarily in terms of their private interest. In a passage that may well shock people who take for granted that political participation is an a priori right, Arendt writes that such a system “would spell the end of general suffrage as we understand it today; for only those who as voluntary members of an ‘elementary republic’ have demonstrated that they care for more than their private happiness and are concerned about the state of the world would have the right to be heard in the conduct of the business of the republic.” Arendt the advocate of radically participatory politics would appear here to become Arendt the aristocrat (though she quibbles with this word), ready to deny the hard-won franchise to a sizable portion of the modern-day public. And what would this public stand to gain? A distinctly modern freedom: freedom from politics.
In an age of rote faith in democracy as the best possible—if not in fact best—regime, Arendt’s suggestion that those who are not suited for or interested in politics could simply abstain, leaving public affairs to those who are demonstrably interested in the public good, reads, on the one hand, as heretical, and, on the other, as almost hopelessly utopian. We are wont to view political regimes on a binary, with liberal democracy holding the prized place in its maintenance of freedom on the one side and authoritarianism, whose central evil is that it suspends this freedom by doing away with the rule of law, on the other. The great merit of Arendt’s thinking, both in On Revolution and across her corpus more broadly, is to challenge the notion of freedom that is at the heart of that proposed dichotomy.
If freedom is posed in conventionally negative, liberal terms as the absence of arbitrary authority, government takes on a limited role. What could be a forum in which individuals deliberate and act upon the fundamental questions of political life turns into a bureaucratic body that merely administers justice, goods, and services. By privileging such a strictly private notion of freedom, liberalism and communism actually share in common an understanding of what government should be, even if they disagree about its scope. As Schmitt puts it in his essay “Roman Catholicism and Political Form,” both bourgeois and proletarian, capitalist and the communist, reject the authority of sovereign governance in favor of the state conceived as an “economic-technical mechanism.” According to this line of thinking, the liberal democratic West shares in common with social democracies and authoritarian regimes the central tenet of a purely administrative state. With the liberal understanding of freedom, politics has become technology: it is not rooted in the vigorous debate of men and women confident in whatever consensus emerges, but in a seamless, ever-present process that ensures the distribution of both goods and justice according to a pre-selected understanding of the quality of life. What differentiates the liberal from the authoritarian regime is only that it has a more capacious understanding of what human beings need to live well or to live at all: under liberalism, equity and civil liberties are as basic of goods as food and housing. But both regimes conceive the maintenance of these prearranged standards as, predominantly, a top-down affair.
In short, the modern republic presupposes a hard limit on the political freedom of self-governance in order to maintain a negative freedom from arbitrary rule. While Arendt shares this critique of liberalism in common with Schmitt, she offers a diametrically opposed solution. Schmitt recommends the reinvigoration of politics according to the hierarchical principle of sovereign authority, which he finds in flourishing form in the Roman Catholic Church. In stark contrast to Schmitt’s authoritarian solution, Arendt proposes a system of horizontal authority on the model of the Greek agora, the New England township, and the Russian soviet. Recognizing, as Schmitt does, that there must be authority in politics, she anticipates that in a council system it would emerge in horizontal, not vertical, fashion. While this mode of government would resemble the pyramidal structure of the authoritarian regime, “authority would have been generated neither at the top nor bottom, but on each of the pyramid’s layers.” Such a system was known to America prior to the Revolution, in the form of the township democracy, and carried through it by the founders, who understood “happiness” not as private welfare but as public participation and the esteem that arises therefrom. Similar forms arose in the revolutionary periods of Russia, France, and Hungary but were lost to the machinations of party politics and the purported imperative of economic welfare.
That such a system could arise again, especially outside the exceptional circumstances of political revolution, Arendt recognizes as unlikely. But her thinking can lead us to fruitful conclusions about democracy today. If it is true that we are political animals in the Aristotelian sense—that is, that we naturally tend to reason about good and bad, just and unjust—this does not necessarily mean that we are political animals in the Arendtian sense—that we discover ourselves in the public sphere, on the stage of word and deed. That human beings have this capacity is not in question, rather, the question is whether they want to use it. While Arendt’s statement that the council system would mean the end of general suffrage might shock us, widespread political apathy and antipathy betray that many of us already seek freedom from politics. Removed as we are from the experiences of women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement, for many Americans, the franchise lacks the spiritual character that it held for previous generations. As the Roman historian Polybius documents in his famous account of regime change, each generation removed from the experience of winning freedom begins to take it for granted, inviting tyranny. Alexis de Tocqueville noted this too, in his concern that Americans, pacified by the high material standard of life in their society, would welcome an “administrative despotism.” And no wonder the franchise has lost its spiritual power, when a vote is little more than a choice between two pre-selected alternatives.
Arendt’s political vision has been critiqued on the grounds that its elitism is in marked contradiction to her commitment to participatory politics. But Arendt anticipates this critique when she writes that the term elite “implies an oligarchic government, the domination of the many by the rule of the few.” What Arendt has in mind she takes directly from her interpretation of the American founders: government by a group of public-spirited individuals who rule in service of the common good. They do not decide on this good, but they act as a kind of “filter” for public opinion, in the mode in which the American Senate was initially conceived. If liberal democracy has not delivered on its promises, it is insufficient to critique proposed alternatives strictly on the grounds that they are not democratic in form. The remarkable faith Americans continue to have in democracy as an ideal, notwithstanding their own political antipathy, is a testament to a much deeper commitment to political equality. But per Arendt’s analysis, the “equality” that comes from voting is hollow. Meaningful equality demands real freedom. What genuine equality there is, justified through political practice, is the sole purview of a select group of representatives. And even their equality is jeopardized if we view them as mere executors of the people’s will, an aggregate of the people’s private interests.
At the very least, we should take Arendt’s critique of liberal democracy seriously because it still contains a vision of the political excellence upon which the American project was based. Critiques of liberalism that ignore the value of freedom and equality are doomed to fail, both because they are hypocritical—not taking into account the political soil without which they surely could not have emerged—and because they underestimate the hold these ideas continue to have on the American public. But the ideal of political equality conflicts with the practical desire for freedom from politics. For Arendt, positive political freedom remains a possibility, but it is just that—never a guarantee. If we choose to abstain from politics, no one will stop us.
Image: Harris & Ewing, Lincoln Memorial Under Construction, photograph, 1915 (Library of Congress, DC)